Mozart: reimagined
“Mozart: Reimagined” provides fresh looks at one of our most familiar composers by refracting the master’s music through contemporary sources. Moreover, this program interrogates the classical canon’s place in modern performance, ultimately seeking to reframe our approach to canonical composers — neither Mozart-erasure nor redundant Mozart-worship, but a regenerative rediscovery of his music that invites sympathetic resonances today.
Trading excerpts of Seinfeld and classical string quartets, a concert adaptation of my 2019 TEDx talk sparks this dialogue between Mozart and artists of our time, using the sitcom to decode the language of expectation and irony in music without a plot.
An informed approach to the canon not only celebrates the composers it enshrines, but also acknowledges the voices it excludes. Plagued in the modern era by the problematic nickname “the Black Mozart,” Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges had achieved a celebrity and financial stability unknown to Mozart by the time they lived under the same roof. Furthermore, the first of Saint-Georges’ two lost clarinet concertos predates Mozart’s by nine years, and my arrangement of his poignant Adagio imagines one of these missing pieces for clarinet.
One of three clarinet quintets that anchor this program, Robert Levin’s completion of a fragmentary Allegro movement resuscitates the heartbeat of a piece left unfinished by Mozart centuries earlier. The program also sports seldom-heard homages to Mozart by more recent master-composers: Messiaen’s virtually unknown, unpublished Chant dans le style de Mozart, and Pärt’s minimalist recomposition of an early piano sonata. Even Schoenfield’s klezmer-laden Refractions departs from Mozart, transplanting The Marriage of Figaro to a Hasidic wedding scene.
My quintet arrangement of a movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata, K. 331 serves as a companion to the immortal Clarinet Quintet, K. 581 in the same key, played in its original version on a rare extended-range clarinet I commissioned. By promoting cross-century collaboration between Mozart and contemporary voices, this program seeks a more imaginative and inclusive way to engage a canon that risks muzzling future creation, choosing instead an approach that “enriches our sense of what music has been, and enriches our sense of what music can be.”
Sample program:
TEDx talk concert adaptation: "Music About Nothing: Seinfeld and the Classical Style"
Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Adagio in F minor [arr. Graeme Steele Johnson]
Mozart: Clarinet Quintet fragment in B-flat major, K. Anh. 91 [completed by Robert Levin]
Messiaen: Chant dans le style de Mozart for clarinet and piano (1986, unpublished)
Pärt: Mozart-Adagio (1992/2005) [adapted for clarinet, cello and piano]
Mozart: Tema con variazioni from Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331 [arr. Graeme Steele Johnson]
Paul Schoenfield: Refractions for clarinet, cello and piano
Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581
Trading excerpts of Seinfeld and classical string quartets, a concert adaptation of my 2019 TEDx talk sparks this dialogue between Mozart and artists of our time, using the sitcom to decode the language of expectation and irony in music without a plot.
An informed approach to the canon not only celebrates the composers it enshrines, but also acknowledges the voices it excludes. Plagued in the modern era by the problematic nickname “the Black Mozart,” Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges had achieved a celebrity and financial stability unknown to Mozart by the time they lived under the same roof. Furthermore, the first of Saint-Georges’ two lost clarinet concertos predates Mozart’s by nine years, and my arrangement of his poignant Adagio imagines one of these missing pieces for clarinet.
One of three clarinet quintets that anchor this program, Robert Levin’s completion of a fragmentary Allegro movement resuscitates the heartbeat of a piece left unfinished by Mozart centuries earlier. The program also sports seldom-heard homages to Mozart by more recent master-composers: Messiaen’s virtually unknown, unpublished Chant dans le style de Mozart, and Pärt’s minimalist recomposition of an early piano sonata. Even Schoenfield’s klezmer-laden Refractions departs from Mozart, transplanting The Marriage of Figaro to a Hasidic wedding scene.
My quintet arrangement of a movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata, K. 331 serves as a companion to the immortal Clarinet Quintet, K. 581 in the same key, played in its original version on a rare extended-range clarinet I commissioned. By promoting cross-century collaboration between Mozart and contemporary voices, this program seeks a more imaginative and inclusive way to engage a canon that risks muzzling future creation, choosing instead an approach that “enriches our sense of what music has been, and enriches our sense of what music can be.”
Sample program:
TEDx talk concert adaptation: "Music About Nothing: Seinfeld and the Classical Style"
Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Adagio in F minor [arr. Graeme Steele Johnson]
Mozart: Clarinet Quintet fragment in B-flat major, K. Anh. 91 [completed by Robert Levin]
Messiaen: Chant dans le style de Mozart for clarinet and piano (1986, unpublished)
Pärt: Mozart-Adagio (1992/2005) [adapted for clarinet, cello and piano]
Mozart: Tema con variazioni from Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331 [arr. Graeme Steele Johnson]
Paul Schoenfield: Refractions for clarinet, cello and piano
Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581